Harry Potter: B2B Marketing Lessons from the Insanely Popular Series with Director of Content Strategy at SAP Concur, Kendra Walters

Marketing is like magic.

It takes the right words in the right tone to cast a spell on your audience. 

That’s what we’re talking about today with the help of our special guest, Kendra Walters, Director of Content Strategy at SAP Concur. 

Together, we’re chatting about marketing lessons from Harry Potter, including having a ‘red thread’ tying your content to your storyline, creating a repeatable structure for your content, and creating a mystery worth solving.

About our guest, Kendra Walters

Kendra Walters is Director of Content Strategy at SAP Concur. Here, she leads the content strategy for Enterprise Americas developing compelling, unique, and engaging content that drives awareness for the company’s world-leading travel and expense solutions. She has been with the company over 11 years and built the center of excellence for content strategy in 2015 where she has developed and grown a team of talented marketers who have brought home several awards including two Killer Content Awards. 

Kendra’s multi-faceted marketing background spanning over 15 years in tech, medical, and financial services allows her to relate to a multitude of audiences and put the customer at the center. She has a breadth of knowledge in B2B content strategy, development, lifecycle, and optimization as well as demand generation, GTM strategy, and field marketing. Also a trained graphic designer and writer with a passion for storytelling, she strives to bring a unique voice to each piece of content and campaign put into market.

About SAP Concur

SAP Concur is the world’s leading brand for integrated travel, expense, and invoice management solutions, driven by a relentless pursuit to simplify and automate these everyday processes. The highly-rated SAP Concur mobile app guides employees through business trips, charges are directly populated into expense reports, and invoice approvals are automated. By integrating near real-time data and using AI to analyze transactions, businesses can see what they’re spending, improve compliance, and avoid possible blind spots in the budget. SAP Concur solutions help eliminate yesterday’s tedious tasks, make today’s work easier, and support businesses to run at their best.

About Harry Potter

Harry Potter is a story about an orphan boy named Harry Potter who finds out he’s a wizard. The story follows Harry and his closest friends, Hermione Granger and Ron Weasley, through each school year at Hogwarts School of Wizardry. It started as a series of 7 books by author J.K. Rowling, the first being Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, which was released in 1997.

What B2B Companies Can Learn From Harry Potter:

• Have a ‘red thread’ that connects your content to your storyline. Tell your audience a continuous story. Make connections between pieces of content for a sense of cohesiveness. Kendra says, “Don’t just do ‘random acts of marketing.’ Use that red thread to carry through, from the top of the funnel when someone is seeking you out in SEO, all the way to the bottom when you close, and even through renewals.” She adds, “Look at your storytelling like a seven chapter or a seven part book with multiple subplots.”
• Create a repeatable structure for your content. It makes your job easier, and creates a familiar blueprint your audience will recognize. Ian says that with each Harry Potter book, “There’s that structure. You know each book is a school year.” And we can apply that to marketing, he says, in that “You need to have sign posts for your audience so that they know exactly what they're getting into.” Kendra adds, “There's a formulaic structure to the books. Layered on top of all of these subplots and plots and characters. And so, I think having that formula to your campaigns or your content is a great way to think about it.”
• Create a mystery worth solving. B2B marketing doesn’t make you think analytically or engage your problem solving skills. But it should. Make your audience think, analyze, question the ideas in your content to engage them more deeply in your brand. Ian says, “Most B2B marketing or content is literally just telling you what the thing is, right? It's not creating any controversy. It's not creating multiple points of view. It's not debating things that could happen. In B2B marketing, you need to create stuff that people can disagree about.”

Quotes

*”We talk about this idea of human to human marketing, B2B people are still people and you're still buying from a human but we have the least human marketing possible. We have the least human content possible.” - Ian Faison

*”A lot of time we write content that's for us and not for our customers or our audience. And so use words that mean something to them, not just mean something to you. What questions are they actually asking when they're searching for something in SEO? And is the content answering those questions?” - Kendra Walters

*”Building that context to know when to use what type of content at what point in the funnel is something that can give you a lot more information than just like, ‘Oh, how many people looked at my webpage?’” - Kendra Walters

Time Stamps

[0:55] Meet Kendra Walters, Director of Content Strategy at SAP Concur

[4:02] The Enchantment of Storytelling: Harry Potter's Impact and Creation

[11:51] Masterful Storytelling: Plotting, Pacing, and Character Development in Harry Potter

[20:18] Translating Magic into Marketing: Key Takeaways from Harry Potter for B2B Marketers

[26:17] Diving Deep into Harry Potter Fandom

[27:40] Creating Raving Fans: The Harry Potter Effect

[28:05] The Mystery and Engagement in Storytelling

[29:04] B2B Marketing Insights from Harry Potter

[30:21] Emotional Takeaways and the Power of Choices

[31:44] Relatability and Human Elements in B2B Marketing

[36:31] Content Strategy and Audience Engagement

[38:33] The Impact of Content Marketing and Measuring ROI

[41:58] Campaign Success Stories and Advice for Content Strategists

[46:57] Concluding Thoughts on Harry Potter and Content Marketing

Links

Watch Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Read Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Listen to SAP Concur Conversations

Connect with Kendra on LinkedIn

Learn more about SAP Concur

About Remarkable!

Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both non-fiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com. 

In today’s episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios) and Meredith Gooderham (Senior Producer). Remarkable was produced this week by Meredith Gooderham, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK. 

Create something remarkable. Rise above the noise.